But to read the story in this way would be to ignore the presence of magic in Mexican life. Veracruz, Melchor’s home state, on the eastern coast of Mexico, has the highest number of femicides in the country. There were 1,006 registered murders of women in 2019, a 137 percent increase since 2014. Male violence against women is rampant in Mexico. It would be easy to read the story as an allegory. During the process, the spirit-clearly a male force-claims he is entitled to the woman’s body because she chose to enter the house herself: “She sought me, she went looking for me!” it says through her transformed voice. Her friends take her to a healer for an exorcism, which doesn’t work. Her eyes go blank, she hits her friends with astonishing strength, and she speaks in tongues. Toward the end of the night, one of the women in the group appears to succumb to a demonic possession. In Fernanda Melchor’s story “La Casa del Estero,” from her collection Aquí no es Miami (2018), a group of friends spend the night in “la casa del diablo” (the devil’s house), an abandoned property near their hometown in the state of Veracruz that the locals believe to be haunted.
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